Ali Wong’s New Netflix Special Proves She’s the Dirtiest Comic Working Today
The raunchiest comic working today?
There’s a lot of competition for the title. Nikki Glaser made her bid with this year’s Someday You’ll Die special. Chris Rock is usually good for graphic laughs. There are lots of nasty podcasts to enjoy on your commute. But for straight-up raunch, it’s hard to imagine anyone topping Ali Wong’s new Netflix special, Single Lady.
Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your personal comedy preferences. The easily offended will curl up into the fetal position watching Single Lady, Wong’s X-rated account of her return to the dating life at age 40. But if hard-core descriptions of assorted sex acts tickle your funny bone, this is the special for you.
Don't Miss
To be clear, I’m not just talking about sex as a comedy topic. Plenty of comics do that. I’m referring to the extremely detailed vocabulary Wong uses in her stand-up, the kind that makes the special uncomfortable to watch with your mom in the room. For example (and Mom, this is your cue to leave the article):
- Wong informs us that “a divorced mom just wants to get dicked down.” She’s looking for a huge boner that’s going to poke her brain, smashing her frontal cortex over and over. And when that’s finished, her new beau must “eat that pussy long, long time.”
- She loves her TOTO toilet, a Japanese bidet experience that’s like “Hello Kitty and Godzilla double-teaming your taint after you take a shit.”
- She refuses to command a man to “Eat my pussy” since that should just be common sense. How humiliating! It’s like shouting, “Fee fi fo fum, lick my taint, or I’ll blow your house down.”
- She talks about a 25-year-old flying to L.A. so she could “fuck the shit out of him.” The experience was so good that she “flew to Chicago to fuck the shit out of him again.”
- Erectile dysfunction? No problem. “You just have to eat out my ass right away.” In other words, Wong wants a partner who will “place the hole where food goes in right on top of the hole where food goes out.”
Get the idea? Gleeful profanity reigns in Single Lady, and the audience seems to be, er, eating it up. The unexpectedly filthy coming out of any comic’s mouth will usually get a laugh, especially at first — it’s the comedy of shock, laughter because we didn’t see it coming. But dirty comedy is a tough act to pull off for an hour. The first time you hear Andrew “Dice” Clay spout a dirty limerick, you’ll likely giggle. By the time he’s on his tenth variation on Dirty Mother Goose, the effect is less potent.
It’s to Wong’s credit that there’s vulnerability beneath the vulgarity. Behind the sex stuff is a woman trying to figure out just what she’s looking for at 40 — and maybe freedom is better than a relationship, at least for now. It’s a compelling journey, albeit on a road paved with the dirtiest jokes you can imagine.
